Anna Zesbaugh is the founder and CEO of Corpse Reviver, a non-alcoholic, tea-based sparkling electrolyte drink with a hand-drawn can that looks more like a vintage apothecary label than anything else on the functional beverage shelf. Furloughed from a luxury hospitality job in 2020, she built three businesses over the next six years, all of them rooted in a single prohibition-era research thread that started one strange afternoon in Denver. In 2025, she closed two of them to bet everything on Corpse Reviver, which is now in over a thousand stores including Walmart, Whole Foods, and Erewhon. She made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Food & Drink.

In this episode we get into:

• The moment she knew her first brand wasn't the one

• Why closing a retail brand is a slow burn

• Posting the failures instead of dressing them up as pivots

• The strange afternoon in Denver that started everything

• A college neighbor, a designer, and a can nobody else could have made

• Asking customers what they wanted before launching Corpse Reviver

• Twenty-five days, five Costcos, fifteen-hour shifts

• Why the year-three team couldn't get her to year five

• Coaches she pays to carry the highs and lows

• Her dad as the closest thing to a co-founder

• The note on her bathroom mirror from 2020

• What she flew home for the week Blind Tiger closed

More:

• Find Corpse Reviver: drinkcorpsereviver.com